Darkness and dark decks

...and trailing entrails by itself is not dark.

Seeing the razor in your hand is not dark.

Hearing the steel against the strop - the an arc of blood on the tile in that pasty fluorescent lighting...in arterial real time...

That's dark.

Hitchcock said, “Where there is no imagination there is no horror.”

Darkness triggers your imagination, and allows it to become a participant.

Gratuitous gore does not.

Solid symbolism is only necessary in an Apollonian world. In a Dionysian world, our imagination fills the voids – which may be vast.

Remember, Hitchcock shot "Psycho" in Black and White rather than color (one reason was cost, the other was it was too gory in color). the shower scene is 45 seconds long, contains 90 cuts and no violence is shown. A raising and falling knife, screaming, and bosco chocolate syrup. That’s it. Why is it so horrifying?

Because we ‘see’ what is never shown – our imagination connects the dots and fills the voids.

That's why I like the Savage, I guess - there is gore and all sorts - but it doesn't feel gratuitous. And it certainly sparks the imagination.

I also like unillustrated books; whenever one sees an illustrated one later, or a movie, or something - it is always so WRONG in terms of what you KNEW everything looked like.

For me choosing a deck it is atmosphere and whether or not I feel in tune with it.... Bohemian Gothic is still a deck of choice I use to explore when I'm feeling off key, anxious, a bit threatened, unhappy..... any of the above. I find it supports me by facing me with myself when I am in that kind of a mood, it leads me out into sunlight where a jolly looking deck with bunnies and happy songs might just make me even more dislocated and lost.

That's not what I would think of as dark though. To be really dark a deck would have to lead me into places that were actively unhealthy for me to be. Really dark for me would be about nurturing, growing and colluding with (as against challenging and bringing into relief) hate. (Hate has an Old English derivation according to Wiktionary, hatian. Perhaps that's why the word feels somewhat primal and basic.)

A deck with scary, sadistic clowns. Now that I would find dark.

Aerin

I love 'dark.' I consider the Medieval Scapini to be a dark deck. It looks at what I call our "dark" side. The evil that lurks inside of us. Everyone has a shadow side. No matter how much we try to focus on sweetness and light, there are still our dreams to remind us of the dark side of our natures.

There is no wholeness without your dark side. It operates largely in our subconscious mind and stays well hidden most of the time. We all work very hard to keep our inner darkness hidden from ourselves and from others. I've read studies that discuss the primal rage of infants. We were all originally "dark" as well as "light."

The darkest deck I've ever seen is the Giger. It's one of my very favorites. It was horrifying when I first got it. It still is. It presents the horror of a fantasy world where women are frightening on many levels. People are frightening in the Giger deck. People are, in fact, frightening. The dark decks tell the truth about what kind of creatures we really are. In the Medieval Scapini people wear leers rather than smiles. The world is a scary place in that deck.

The Deviant Moon is also a dark deck. But it represents all of our natures in it's 78 cards, and the resulting balance makes for a rich, fully human deck.

I don't see the world as being a safe place. I have done my time, like Gregory (I didn't know until just now) in mental institutions. The scary people are the ones not in hospitals. The inmates are sensitive, vulnerable people who don't harm others, but often harm themselves. You won't find dangerous people in mental hospitals, for the most part.

When I talk about my sidekick, the aggressive and somewhat insane purple octopus named El Pulpo (which means "the octopus" in Spanish) I'm describing my Id. You could say I'm characterizing my dark side in order to include it in my daily life. The extent to which we repress the darkness is the extent of our inability to be whole.